Of all the escape room movies I’ve seen, the obscure Escape: Puzzle of Fear seems the least interested in its exploitable concept. Directed by the basically and justifiably anonymous J. Jones, the film takes half an hour to get its vapid characters into one … and then, within minutes, out of it, switching gears so abruptly, it has to have damaged the clutch.

(To be fair, a brief prologue takes place in the desired environment. Harried contestants battle against the clock and say, “Oh, snap” and “Hey, I found another weird thing.” Yet this place isn’t the one Puzzle of Fear’s participants will tackle, so it reeks of “tacked-on in post.”)

Our main man is Matt (Tommy Nash, who also produced), a contemptible dude-bro talent agent we meet as he wakes in bed. Immediately, he gets blown by his girlfriend (Aubrey Reynolds, 2018’s Frenzy) and only reaches climax by thinking about a potato sack with eyeholes pulled over someone’s head — a weird fetish, if you ask me, but you do you, Matt.

Later that day, he’s mansplaining “escape room” to her when his Cuba Gooding Jr.-esque best bud (Omar Gooding, Ghost Dad) comes bearing tickets to the Escape Hotel. He hypes these tix like they’re for the Super Bowl sidelines or in the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards’ splash zone.

At the über-posh, white-gloved Escape Hotel, they play the “crime and justice room.” Objective: Find the two 8-year-old girls gone missing while trick-or-treating. It takes Matt a ridiculously long time to make the connection between the mission and a real-life event in his past involving two 8-year-old girls gone missing while trick-or-treating. When he does, you can see recognition wash over his face. I mean, what are the odds?

And what kind of trouble is two-time Emmy nominee Nicholas Turturro in that he has to take a sixth-billed part in this trash?

And why did scripter Lizze Gordon (#Captured) type the line, “Ew, it stinks in here. Did you do a wee-wee?” much less leave it in?

For narrative structure, story leaps, character behavior, infantile dialogue, atonal performances and much, much more, Escape: Puzzle of Fear is top-to-bottom baffling. Let me out. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

I used to hold Roddy McDowall’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes absence against him. Now that I’ve learned — and, more importantly, seen — the reason, all is forgiven. It casts an enchanting spell.

In the only film he directed, The Ballad of Tam Lin, Ava Gardner stars as Michaela Cazaret, a self-described “immensely rich” and “immensely old” woman whose tissue box of younger lovers keeps her young. Currently up — in more ways than one — is Tom (Ian McShane, Too Scared to Scream). He pledges allegiance to her heart until he meets the age-appropriate Janet (Stephanie Beacham, Inseminoid). Living at a clergy house, Janet is the virgin to Ms. Cazaret’s whore.

Still immensely foxy in middle age, Ms. Cazaret is like a house mother to the parade of a dozenish mod hangers-on cavorting about her country manse. Theirs is a careless life of Frisbee, vibraphone jams, tarot cards, parlor games, puppies and intoxicants. When Tom tries to leave, Ms. Cazaret uses her witchy ways to turn their petulance predatory.

It may not sound like much on paper — its 16th-century Scottish source material certainly doesn’t — but The Ballad of Tam Lin is a folk-horror masterpiece. McDowall exhibits a firm grasp on credibly establishing a pastoral, ecumenical mood, then injecting it with hallucinogens. For example, Tom’s night flight from the Cazaret mob astonishes at least half of one’s senses as he transforms into a bear and then aflame — as eerie and nightmarish as it is gorgeous. Earlier touches are comparatively simplistic, yet no less gratifying, like bathing the viewer’s POV in a golden yellow when either lead slips on color-tinted sunglasses.

While McShane is great as the protagonist who doesn’t quite start as such, the picture belongs to Gardner. The sheer vulnerability of her performance can’t be accidental. A classic beauty of Hollywood’s golden age, Gardner stood in a sort of cinematic purgatory at the time of Tam Lin: just past what studio execs consider to be a woman’s prime and, therefore, on the cusp of entering the disposability stage demanded by disaster-movie ensembles, where she would spend most of the decade. Just because she was no longer “bankable” doesn’t mean she wasn’t luminous, and so good at playing Cazaret’s three switched-on moods: evil, seductive and fragile. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.